and there is, then, indeed, an unredeemed bareness and desolation without the glow of memory or hope, in life’s ending days. Vain to urge this: even if the words call up a grave look for a while, the thought is soon shelved till “a convenient season.” And the life, if not the lips, of many proclaims—Let the world have my Spring, Summer, Autumn; and after that no doubt a good crop of holiness and heavenly-mindedness will yet be found in the thin last sere days of Life’s year. Let the world have the best of the year; we will spare its fragments and leavings for God. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and Spring goes, and Summer passes, and Autumn dwindles, and the foolish heart begins to discover that it is too late then. For its life is chilled, its sap gone down, its fertility exhausted. It is not the time for blossoms now, or fruit; habits are fixed, and effort is paralysed; often ugly fungi have sprung from the ruins of comparatively innocent thoughtless delights. And this was not foreseen, nor will men believe it, although you sadly warn them of it. We read it from the Bible, we cry it from the pulpit—
“They that seek Me early shall find Me.”
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,
While the evil days come not,
Nor the years draw nigh,
When thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.”
“To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”
But young and old listen, and then go home to their Sunday dinner; and other talk, and other interests, and other thoughts, dry up the water that had stood in a little pool upon the heart, but had not sunk in. God’s Spirit could have drawn it in, but His help was not heartily asked, even if asked at all.
* * * * *
Ah yes, is it not true, as one writes, that “men are ever beguiling themselves with the dream that they shall one day be what they are not now; they balance their present consciousness of a low worldly life, and of a mind heavy and dull to spiritual things, with the lazy thought that some day God will bring home to them in power the realities of faith in Christ. Who is there that has not at some time secretly indulged this soothing flattery, that the staid gravity of age, when youth is quelled, or the leisure of retirement, when the fret of busy life is over, or, it may be, the inevitable pains and griefs which are man’s inheritance, shall break up in his heart the now-sealed fountains of repentance, and make, at last, his religion a reality? So men dream away their lives in pleasures, sloth, trade, or study. Who has not allayed the uneasy consciousness of a meagre religion, with the hope of a future change? Who has not been thus mocked by the enemy of man? Who has not listened, all too readily, to him who would cheat us of the hour that is, and of all the spiritual earnings which faith makes day by day in God’s service, stealing from us the present hour, and leaving us a lie in exchange? And yet, this present hour is all we have. To-morrow must be to-day before we can use it; and day after day we squander in the hope of a to-morrow; but to-morrow shall be stolen away too, as to-day and yesterday. God’s kingdom was very nigh to him who trembled at the judgment to come. Felix trembled once; we nowhere read that he trembled again.”
Habits are stronger when we are weaker. People forget this, and imagine that they can cast off fetters that have grown from silken to iron, and that with force that has dwindled from vigour to impotence. That they can lie fallow all the growing time of life, and cram clearing, ploughing, sowing, growth, harvest, all into the dark, few, shortening days of life’s decay. “A convenient season!” Ah! does this mean, then, the end of the seasons—the meagre leavings of life’s year? Is this the season convenient for God’s work—for the great purpose of our being? Is spiritual life likely to be then first lifting up its head, when all life is fading away?
“Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.” This is a command exquisitely applicable to the gleanings of an old age, whose harvest has been given to God:
“They shall still bring forth fruit in old age”;